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THE   GREAT  THOUSAND   YEARS 


THE  GREAT 
THOUSAND  YEARS 

WRITTEN  IN  THE  YEAR  I908,  AND  FIRST 
PRINTED  IN  PAX,  THE  MAGAZINE  OF  THE 
BENEDICTINES  OF  CALDEY,  IN  DECEMBER,  I9IO. 
TO  WHICH  IS  ADDED  A  BRIEF  COMMENTARY 
WRITTEN     IN    JANUARY,     I918,    AND     CALLED 

TEN  YEARS  AFTER 


By 


RALPH  ADAMS  CRAM 

LITT.D.,   LL.D.,   F.A.I. A.,   A.N. A.,   F.R.G.3. 


BOSTON 
MARSHALL  JONES   COMPANY 

MPCCCCXIX 


Copyrtghty  igi8 

BY 

Ralph  Adams  Cram 

Second  printing,  November,  1919 


PRINTED  BY 
THE    UNIVERSITY    PRESS,    CAMBRIDGE,    U.  S.  A. 


TO   THE   RIGHT   REVEREND 

DOM  AELRED    CARLYLE,  O.  S.  B, 
LORD  ABBOT  OF  CALDEY 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 


THE  GREAT  THOUSAND 
YEARS 

SOONER  or  later  will  come  an  historian 
of  novel  temper,  one  who  will  content 
himself  neither  with  some  narrow  span  of 
years  covered  by  the  life  of  a  man  or  the 
duration  of  a  dynasty,  nor  yet  with  the 
hardly  more  comprehensive  annals  of  a 
nation  or  of  a  race.  To  him,  standing  in 
brightness,  all  times  will  unroll  themselves 
in  majestical  sequence  between  darkness  and 
darkness:  coming  from  the  shadow  of  the 
unrecorded,  vanishing  in  the  shadow  of  the 
unforeseen.  Then  will  appear  the  unity  of 
history,  the  Titanic  pulsation  that  throbs 
through  all  time;  and  eras  and  epochs  will 
take  their  proper  place  simply  as  sequent 
minutes  assembling  into  the  hours  that  make 
up  the  long  day  between  the  night  that  pre- 
cedes and  the  night  that  follows  after. 

The  fashion  of  history  that  concerned  it- 
self with  the  rise  and  fall  of  dynasties,  the 
doings  and  death  of  kings,  was  quite  the 
foolishest   method    man    ever   vainly    im- 

[3] 


;;•.,  THE.G^EAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

;  .agine.i..  These 'things  are  but  the  froth  of 
•''fcui''stirig:  ijabbles  on  the  waves  of  change, 
and  it  is  only  by  looking  beneath  that  the 
slow  pulsation  reveals  itself;  a  deep  throb- 
bing in  five-hundred-year  epochs,  a  tide  that 
rises  and  falls  in  obedience  to  some  primal 
and  unknowable  law,  signalized  in  its  tre- 
mendous beatings  by  the  lives  of  men  who 
are  the  instruments  of  the  Will  of  God, 
and  such  efficient  instruments  that  now  and 
again  one  almost  feels  that  they  themselves 
are  the  effective  energy. 

This  great  throbbing  is  as  rhythmical  as 
are  human  heart-beats,  only  the  pulsations 
are  each  five  centuries  long,  the  beat  falling 
at  these  regular  intervals  both  before  and 
after  the  year  of  the  Incarnation,  which 
forms  of  course  the  moment  from  which 
we  calculate  our  system  of  historical  perio- 
dicity. Before,  though  racial  identity  lasted 
sometimes  for  two  thousand  years,  these 
great  periods  were  always  divided  into 
epochs  of  perfect  distinctness,  each  approxi- 
mately of  five  centuries'  duration,  and 
whether  we  consider  Egypt,  Judaea,  Baby- 
lonia, or  Assyria,  we  find  that  the  years 
1500,  1000  and  500  B.C.  mark  approximately 
the  end  of  a  consistent  era  of  five  hundred 

[4] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

years,  the  beginning  of  another  destined  to 
equal  duration.  Hellenism  lasted  through 
two  quite  distinct  phases,  almost  to  the  Birth 
of  Christ.  Rome  for  an  equal  period  until 
five  centuries  after.  Then  came  five  hun- 
dred years  while  the  Eastern  Empire  was 
going  through  its  first  and  greatest  epoch 
(later  to  be  followed  by  an  equal  space  of 
time  marked  by  a  desperate  and  hopeless 
struggle  for  existence),  while  the  ra^es  of 
the  North  were  in  France  and  Gef^any 
and  England  laying  deep  the  foundations 
of  their  great  future,  and  while  the  South 
was  hidden  in  the  gloom  of  the  Dark  Ages; 
a  shrouding  cloud  of  horror  and  despair 
that  only  opened  now  and  then  to  show  — 
working  dimly  —  the  beginnings  of  the 
great  epoch  of  Mediaevalism  that  began  // 
with  the  year  looo,  and  ended  five  centuries  // 
later  with  the  dawn  of  our  own  epoch,  that 
may  be  neither  estimated  nor  named  until 
its  term,  which  is  due  to  fall  before  the 
close  of  the  present  century. 

This  is  all  in  general  terms,  of  course; 
there  sometimes  comes  nearly  a  century  of 
premature  decay,  and  sometimes  vitality 
endures  beyond  its  allotted  space  by  almost 
an  equal  period,  but  no  epoch  has  either 

[5] 


f* 


i 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

begun  or  ended  except  in  the  century  pre- 
ceding or  following  the  established  node, 
and  one  might  almost  say  that  history  re- 
cords no  crucial  point  in  civilization  within 
the  three  centuries  that  fall  in  the  midst  of 
an  epoch.  Of  course  there  is  often  a  long 
period  of  incubation;  the  beginnings  of  a 
new  era  reach  back  century  after  century 
until  the  point  of  departure  is  found  coin- 
cident with  the  effective  opening  of  the 
antecedent  epoch,  as  the  origins  of  Rome 
are  working  darkly  in  the  years  of  Mara- 
thon and  of  Salamis  and  Thermopylae  that 
signalized  the  flaming  dawn  of  Hellenism; 
as  the  Son  of  God  becomes  Incarnate  just 
as  Roman  imperialism  rises  dominant  over 
the  world,  even  though  five  centuries  were 
to  pass  before  His  reign  was  to  be  estab- 
lished in  the  East;  as  S.  Benedict  and  Pope 
S.  Gregory  the  Great  appear  five  centuries 
before  the  final  redemption  of  the  West, 
and  Charlemagne  three  centuries  later 
strives  to  break  the  thraldom  of  the  Dark 
^  Ages,  a  deed  only  to  be  accomplished  at  the 
X  coming  node  by  Cluny  and  Otto  the  Great 
/  and  Pope  Gregory  VH.  This  law  of  nodes 
means  only  dominance,  and  as  such  it  mar- 
vellously holds,  while  around  each   node 

[6] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND    YEARS 

assemble  in  the  same  two  bounding  cen- 
turies, all  the  names  of  those  men  who, 
under  God,  are  to  destroy  the  decadent 
epoch  and  build  in  majesty  the  new. 
Through  the  entire  term  of  any  period 
those  who  best  express  it  are  born  at  any 
time,  indeed  it  often  happens  that  the  great 
flowering  is  after  the  trunk  itself  is  dead 
and  decaying,  but  the  men  who  make  epochs 
and  mar  them,  whether  they  are  Benedicts, 
Ottos  and  Hildebrands,  or  Alarics,  Calvins 
and  Borgias,  appear  like  clustered  stars, 
beneficent  or  baleful,  around  that  mysteri- 
ous point  that  forms  a  node  of  history. 

Now,  two  of  these  five-hundred-year  eras 
may  well  be  called  "  The  Great  Thousand 
Years,"  for  so  they  are  to  us  who  consider 
ourselves  component  parts  in  a  still  opera- 
tive Christian  society.  The  first  was  the 
epoch  of  the  beginnings,  the  second  of 
achievement;  the  first  opens  with  the  node 
of  A.D.  500,  the  second  with  that  of  A.D.  1000, 
while  the  latter  closes  with  the  year  1500. 
For  four  centuries  we  have  been  pleased  to 
look  on  exactly  this  time  as  of  no  impor- 
tance, since  we  are  children  of  what  fol- 
lowed; and  if  we  believed  in  our  mother  — 
the    Renaissance-reformation-revolution  — 

[7] 


THE   GREAT  THOUSAND   YEARS 

the  less  we  said  or  thought  about  Mediae- 
valism,  the  better  for  our  peace  of  mind, 
as  the  two  were  separated  by  the  entire 
diameter  of  being. 

Working  silently,  subterraneously —  as 
the  filaments  of  the  mushroom  creep  for 
yards  under  the  ground  before  they  are 
content  to  rise  above  the  surface  —  the 
revolt  against  this  monstrous  ignorance 
gathered  form  and  substance  even  from  the 
last  years  of  the  eighteenth  century,  but  it 
was  not  until  the  end  of  the  first  quarter  of 
the  next  that  it  showed  itself,  sometimes  in 
art,  sometimes  in  economics,  sometimes  in 
religion  and  theology.  Now  it  is  soundly 
established,  crescent  even  while  the  post- 
mediaeval  or  Renaissance  epoch  is  going  to 
its  death  with  the  decadent  violence  of 
anarchy,  profligacy  and  apostasy.  It  is 
not  yet  sovereign  over  destiny,  for  its  day 
is  now  hardly  more  than  at  dawn,  if  the 
hitherto  unbroken  course  of  history  is  to 
meet  with  no  violent  change.  Neither  as  yet 
have  the  great  personalities  that  are  to  be 
the  hammers  of  God  in  beating  down  the 
towering  fabric  of  modernism,  the  effective 
agents  in  His  building  of  a  new  era  — 
neither  as  yet  have  they  appeared,  though 

[8] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

any  moment,  now  that  we  are  well  into  the 
twentieth  century,  we  may  hear  their  foot-    ., ,V 
steps  on  the  hills.    Walter  Scott  and  Turner 
and  Pugin,  Rossetti  and  Morris  and  Ruskin,     '^, 
Pusey,  Keble  and  Cardinal  Newjnan  were     & 
bright    harbingers    of    the    prophets,    but 
greater  than  they  will  surely  follow,  and 
at  thei-r  hands  the  present  dispensation  will 
go  down  in  final  ruin,  the  new  rise  in  wonder 
and  majesty. 

What  this  new  era  shall  be,  who  can  say?  ^ 
There  are  signs  however  that,  in  its  be- 
ginnings at  least,  it  will  be  a  restoration, 
through  a  reversion  to  the  antecedent  type 
of  Mediaevalism:  that  there  it  will  remain, 
content  with  what  has  been,  is  unbelievable, 
but  as  at  the  thousand-year  node  Pope  and 
king  and  monk  reverted  to  the  five-hun- 
dred-year node,  that  Hildebrand  and  Otto 
and  Cluny  might  accomplish  what  Pope 
S.  Gregory  the  Great  and  S.  Benedict  and 
Theodoric  had  initiated,  so  undoubtedly 
shall  we,  when  our  time  is  come,  leap  the 
Dark  Ages  of  the  Renaissance  as  they  the 
Dark  Ages  of  the  barbarian  hordes,  that  we 
may  find  a  solid  basis  for  a  new  advance. 
So  Byzantium  vaulted  five  centuries  in  its 
attempted  return  to  Greek  modes;  so  the 

[9] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

Renaissance  cleared  a  thousand  years  at  a 
bound  to  what  it  thought  the  vantage  ground 
of  Roman  imperialism.  There  was  little  of 
Hellenism  in  the  Eastern  splendour  of  Jus- 
tinian, while  the  self-conscious  classicism 
of  the  Renaissance  merged  quickly  into  the 
unearthly  farrago  of  Calvinism,  materi- 
alism, anarchy,  iLtellectualism  and  infi- 
delity that  characterize  the  latest  epoch, 
now,  it  would  seem,  deliberately  riding  for 
a  fall.  So  of  the  new  regime  that  is  due  to 
reach  its  flower  in  three  or  four  hundred 
years;  whatever  its  point  of  departure,  its 
goal  will  be  widely  different,  but  that  this 
same  base  of  operations  will  be,  so  far  as 
man  can  make  it,  the  base  established  by  the 
era  we  call  Mediaevalism,  the  course  of 
events  now  indicates  with  singular  clarity 
and  emphasis. 

And  could  we  get  a  better  base?  I  think 
not.  As  we  go  back  century  after  century, 
impelled  by  the  new  time-spirit,  our  eyes 
washed  of  the  rheum  of  the  Renaissance- 
reformation-revolution,  we  seem  to  be  enter- 
ing into  a  kind  of  wonderland  that,  what- 
ever its  defects,  and  they  are  many,  was 
nevertheless  the  best  that  Christianity  has 
accomplished   to   date.     It  is  The   Great 

[10] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

Thousand  Years,  and  beside  its  ideals,  its 
impulses,  its  achievements,  all  that  went 
before  seems  tentative,  all  that  follows  — 
shall  I  say  it?  —  slightly  ridiculous.  Let 
us  go  back  to  the  beginnings,  to  the  Year  of 
our  Lord  500,  and  see  how  it  reveals  itself, 
century  after  century,  down  to  the  lamen- 
table end,  on  or  about,  the  coming  of  the 
year  1500. 

Rome  had  fallen,  the  great  Rome  of  the 
West,  and  Theodoric  was  King  in  Italy: 
the  marches  of  Ravenna  had  received  all 
that  survived  of  the  old  civil  power,  and  in 
the  East  Hellenism  and  Orientalism  had 
married  in  the  name  of  Rome,  in  a  strong 
hope  that  the  novel  union  might  prove 
fruitful.  Over  every  vanishing  frontier 
poured  the  savage  hordes  of  Goths  and 
Vandals,  Huns,  Saxons  and  Burgundians: 
civilization  disappeared  in  blood  and  flame, 
and,  as  was  truthfully  said,  "  Roma  fuit^ 
The  great  capital  of  the  world  became  a 
howling  desert,  and  there,  in  the  midst  of 
ruin  and  desolation,  Peter  sat  in  the  totter- 
ing Chair  of  the  Fisherman,  fighting  almost 
single-handed  for  the  primacy,  stubbornly 
contending  against  the  hydra-headed  here- 
sies that  rose  on  every  hand  as  numberless 

[II] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

as  the  devastating  tribes  of  barbarians. 
There  is  something  sublime  in  this  fight  of 
the  forlorn  and  abandoned  Papacy  against 
heresy,  from  Arius  to  the  Iconoclasts,  but 
in  the  end  the  battle  was  won  and  the  gates 
of  hell  could  not  prevail  against  the  Catho- 
lic Church  that  rose  at  last  the  sole  standard 
of  faith  and  morals,  law  and  order,  above 
the  ruins  of  antiquity. 

Actually  the  battle  was  won  between  the 
year  496,  when  Clovis  was  baptized,  and 
590,  the  year  S.  Gregory  the  Great  became 
Pope;  four  centuries  and  more  were  to  pass 
before  the  full  fruition  was  achieved,  but 
the  issue  was  never  in  doubt  after  the  Franks 
became  Catholics  and  a  potential  nation- 
ality; after  S.  Benedict  promulgated  his 
Holy  Rule,  and  after  S.  Gregory  beat  off 
from  the  throat  of  the  Church  the  devouring 
fangs  of  secular  control.  All  the  horrors  of 
the  darkest  hours  of  the  Dark  Ages  were  to 
follow  the  ^^  false  dawn  "  of  Charlemagne, 
but  this  was  but  the  last  desperate  stand  of 
a  barbarism  whose  doom  was  already  sealed. 
The  wave  rose,  broke,  swept  the  world  with 
desolation,  but  close  behind  followed  an- 
other wave  on  the  crest  of  which  rode  the 
ark  of  the  new  life,  bearing  within  it  the 

[12] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

Holy  Rule  of  S.  Benedict  —  the  cogent 
agency  of  regeneration.  Black  as  had  been 
the  gloom  that  closed  around  the  end  of  the 
fifth  century,  that  which  shrouded  the  end 
of  the  tenth  was  even  deeper.  At  the  end  of 
the  ninth  century,  Byzantium  was  a  neg- 
ligible quantity,  Charlemagne  forgotten, 
while  universal  war  and  the  assaults  of 
Mohammedanism  crushed  Europe  down  to 
a  depth  never  before  reached  in  all  history. 
And  then  the  tide  turned:  in  927  S.  Odo  of 
Cluny,  by  one  of  the  most  pregnant  actions 
in  history,  made  of  Benedictinism  a  work- 
ing power  of  amazing  efficiency;  in  962 
Otto  the  Great  restored  the  Western  Em- 
pire, while  S.  Bruno,  under  his  patronage, 
began  the  rebuilding  of  German  civiliza- 
tion; in  987  Hugh  Capet  extinguished  the 
last  of  the  useless  Merovings,  and  as  the  first 
king  of  the  Capetian  dynasty,  with  the  aid 
of  Gerbert,  afterwards  Pope  Sylvester  II, 
did  the  same  for  the  Franks.  By  the  year 
1000  the  Norsemen,  who  were  to  play  so 
vast  a  part  in  the  building  of  Christian 
civilization,  had  become  fixed  in  Nor- 
mandy, converted,  and  fired  with  the  pas- 
sionate zeal  of  Cluny.  The  stage  was  set, 
the  actors  ready,  and  exactly  at  the  thousand 

[13] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

year  node  the  curtain  rose  and  the  splendid 
drama  of  Mediaevalism  began  to  unfold 
itself. 

In  a  way  the  eleventh  may  be  considered 
one  of  the  most  marvellous  centuries  in  all 
history:  everything  happened  and  all  at 
once.  The  Monks  of  Cluny,  Benedictines- 
militant,  were  the  driving  impulse,  the 
Normans  their  efficient  sword.  From  the 
moment  Gerbert  became  Pope  Sylvester  II, 
the  degradation  of  the  Papacy,  that  had 
followed  the  righteous  flame  of  S.  Gregory 
the  Great,  came  to  an  end.  One  German 
Pope  after  another  laboured  for  the  re- 
building of  the  shattered  and  degraded 
citadel,  and  with  Leo  IX,  and  Hildebrand 
(Pope  Gregory  VII),  the  redemption  was 
accomplished.  The  civilization  of  the 
eleventh  century  was  monastic,  Norman, 
and  feudal,  and  its  vitality  was  preter- 
natural. At  every  point  the  heathen  as- 
saults had  been  beaten  back,  the  peril  of 
the  "  false  prophet"  was  at  an  end,  and  the 
northern  tribes,  whether  Teutonic,  Norse, 
Saxon,  or  Frank,  had  been  Christianized 
and  assimilated.  Feudalism-  had  saved 
Europe,  now  the  Benedictines  of  Cluny 
were  to   redeem   it.     Into   Britain,   Italy, 

[14] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

Sicily,  the  Levant,  streamed  the  Normans, 
carrying  with  them  the  Catholic  Faith; 
with  the  swiftness  of  dreams  monasteries 
arose  over  all  Europe,  each  a  centre  of 
law  and  order,  religion,  learning  and  mercy. 
Schools  were  reared  on  monastic  founda- 
tions all  over  the  West;  the  merchant 
guilds  came  into  being,  art  flowered  again 
in  Norman  and  Romanesque  majesty, 
and  at  last  the  fierce  fervour  of  Catholic 
piety  burst  into  the  flame  of  the  First 
Crusade. 

The  year  i  lOO  came,  and  with  it  a  sudden 
change,  though  only  in  agencies,  the  im- 
pulse was  identical.  Cluny  had  exhausted 
itself,  but  again  from  Burgundy,  and  again 
Benedictine,  came  a  new  influence  —  that 
of  the  Cistercians,  with  Bernard  of  Clair- 
vaux  in  the  van.  The  Benedictine  monks 
of  the  new  mode  seized  the  standard  from 
the  loosening  hold  of  the  Cluniacs,  while 
Augustinians  and  Norbertines  (canons,  not 
monastics),  came  to  their  aid;  and  together, 
monks  and  canons,  they  advanced  the  ban- 
ner of  civilization  higher  and  higher  to- 
wards ultimate  victory.  Wonderful  as  was 
the  eleventh  century,  the  twelfth  was  more 
amazing   still:    it   was   the   middle    point 

[15] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

between  the  beginnings  and  the  consumma- 
tion; all  the  potentialities  of  the  eleventh 
century  were  gathered  up  and  focussed  for 
the  culmination  of  the  thirteenth  century. 
It  was  the  age  of  the  guilds  and  communes, 
the  development  of  the  schools  and  the 
advancement  of  learning;  of  the  military 
orders  of  knighthood  and  of  chivalry;  of 
the  trouveres  and  troubadours,  of  Chretien 
de  Troyes  and  the  Arthurian  legends  and 
the  chansons  de  gestes;  of  Noyon,  Chartres, 
Notre  Dame;  Innocent  III,  S.  Bernard, 
S.  Anselm,  S.  Bruno,  S.  Norbert,  S.  Thomas 
Becket,  Peter  the  Venerable,  Suger,  Abe- 
lard,  William  of  Champeaux;  the  Emperor 
Lothair  II,  Richard  Coeur  de  Lion,  Henry 
II,  King  Philip  Augustus,  Fulk  of  Anjou, 
Roger  of  Sicily,  Matilda  of  Tuscany, 
Eleanor  of  Guienne,  Blanche  of  Castille. 
The  twelfth  century  names  seem  almost 
to  cover  the  whole  field  of  religious  de- 
votion, monastic  vigour,  dogmatic  enrich- 
ment; of  chivalry  and  poetry  and  art;  great 
kings,  statesmen,  popes,  sainted  bishops 
and  monks,  models  of  knighthood,  poets, 
sculptors,  architects,  glass  makers,  shoulder 
each  other  in  the  throng  that  surges  through 
the  century.  National  self-consciousness, 
[i6] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

individual  confidence  and  self-respect,  in- 
dustrial emancipation  and  development, 
the  growth  of  schools  and  universities,  go 
hand  in  hand,  and  when  the  thirteenth 
century  opens  there  seems  nothing  more  to 
do.  There  was  enough,  however,  as  we 
shall  see. 

Pope  Innocent  III  and  King  Philip 
Augustus  had  been  carried  over  from  the 
twelfth  century,  and  with  them  came 
S.  Francis  and  S.  Dominic  v^o  were  to 
be  for  the  thirteenth  century  what  the 
Cistercians  had  been  for  the  twelfth,  the 
Cluniacs  for  the  eleventh.  All  over  Europe 
the  spirit  of  nationality,  fostered  during  the 
past  two  centuries,  was  to  reach  its  highest 
point.  There  were  great  kings  in  all  the 
world:  Henry  III,  Edward  I,  Robert 
Bruce,  Philip  Augustus,  Louis  IX,  Fred- 
erick Barbarossa,  Frederick  II,  Rudolph 
of  Hapsburg,  Ferdinand  III,  Alfonso  the 
Wise;  there  were  great  pontiffs  in  Peter's 
chair:  Innocent  III,  Gregory  IX,  Boniface 
VIII.  In  England,  S.  Edmund  of  Canter- 
bury, Stephen  Langton,  and  Robert  Grosse- 
teste  were  worthy  successors  of  S.  Hugh 
of  Lincoln  and  S.  Thomas  Becket.  Catho- 
lic philosophy  came  full  flood  in  the  persons 

[17] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

of  Albertus  Magnus,  Duns  Scotus,  Roger 
Bacon,  S.  Bonaventura,  Raymond  LuUy, 
Alexander  Hales,  and,  prince  of  all, 
S.  Thomas  Aquinas;  while  Blanche  of 
Castille,  S.  Clare  and  S.  Elizabeth  of 
Hungary  carried  on  the  traditions  of  the 
great  women  of  the  last  century.  The 
beginnings  of  Christian  poetry,  painting, 
sculpture  and  architecture,  revealed  in  the 
twelfth  century,  became  the  perfect  achieve- 
ment of  the  thirteenth,  the  Arthurian  and 
the  Nibelungen  epics  take  on  their  perfect 
form,  the  Meistersingers  and  Minnesingers 
rise  to  new  heights,  while  Latin  hymnology 
becomes  almost  a  distinct  category  of  the 
fine  arts,  the  Dies  Irae,  Stabat  Mater,  Hora 
Novissima,  Vexilla  Regis,  Pange  Lingua 
standing  for  ever  by  themselves  on  a  plane 
unapproachable.  Finally,  culmination  of 
all,  comes  Dante,  the  full  flowering  of 
Mediaevalism.  Simultaneously  the  allied 
art  of  music,  which  Catholic  civilization 
had  evolved  for  its  own  expression,  reached 
its  highest  recorded  point  in  the  perfecting 
of  plainsong,  or  the  Gregorian  mode;  in 
Siena  and  Florence  painting  was  born 
through  Duccio,  Cimabue  and  Giotto, 
while  sculpture,  restored  in  South  France 

[i8] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

a  century  before  the  Pisani,  found  at  their 
hands  and  at  those  of  the  sculptors  of 
Chartres,  Paris,  Rheims,  Amiens  and  Wells, 
a  fruition  that  placed  it  almost  on  the  level 
of  the  great  sculpture  of  Greece. 

All  the  minor  arts,  such  as  those  of  the 
metal  worker,  glass  stainer  and  illuminator 
rose  correspondingly;  while  architecture,  the 
chosen  art  of  the  time,  reached,  in  the  final 
Gothic  of  France  and  England,  a  perfection 
never  equalled  before,  nor  approximated 
since.  Bourges  and  Amiens  and  Rheims, 
Westminster,  Lincoln,  York  Abbey,  Wells 
remain,  and  so  far  as  we  can  see,  must  so 
remain  for  ever,  the  highest  expression  of 
the  human  intelligence  working  in  archi- 
tectural forms. 

Every  monastery  had  its  free  school 
open  to  any  who  would,  and  often  its  cir- 
culating library  as  well:  industrial  educa- 
tion at  the  hands  of  these  same  monasteries 
and  the  guilds  was  broader  and  more  ef- 
ficient than  ever  before  or  since,  while  the 
great  universities,  Bologna,  Paris,  Padua, 
Montpellier,  Orleans,  Valencia,  Valladolid, 
Oxford,  grew  into  a  position  of  power  that 
commanded  a  wider  and  more  universal 
influence    even    than    modern    universities 

[19] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

exercise  to-day.  Commerce  and  industry- 
became  almost  perfectly  organized,  and  the 
workman  occupied  a  position  more  digni- 
fied and  more  satisfactory  to  himself  than 
he  ever  has  acquired  since.  To  Pope 
Innocent  III  we  owe  the  institution  of  the 
public  or  city  hospital  as  we  know  it  to-day, 
and  as  a  result  of  his  labours,  by  the  end  of 
the  century,  nearly  all  the  larger  cities  in 
Europe  possessed  their  free  hospitals  for 
the  sick  and  isolation  hospitals  for  lepers 
and  others  suffering  from  diseases  known 
to  be  contagious.  Finally  in  the  matters  of 
civil  liberty,  development  of  constitutional 
government  and  the  organization  of  law 
and  justice,  the  twelfth  and  thirteenth  cen- 
turies take  perhaps  the  first  place  in  history. 
The  Constitutions  of  Clarendon,  Magna 
Carta,  Bracton's  de  Legibus,  the  codifica- 
tion of  the  common  law  under  Edward  I, 
the  Codes  of  Frederick  II,  the  Institutes  of 
S.  Louis,  the  Vehmic  courts  of  Germany, 
the  Golden  Bull  of  Andrew  II  of  Hungary, 
the  codices  of  Canon  Law  of  Gregory  IX 
and  Boniface  VIII,  are  not  only  the  land- 
marks of  civil  liberty,  they  are  as  well  the 
foundation  in  great  measure  of  all  modern 
law. 

[20] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

Catholic  civilization  after  a  thousand 
years  of  preparation,  had  blossomed  in  the 
white  flower  of  Mediaevalism;  comparable 
therewith  there  was  nothing  in  any  his- 
tory that  had*  gone  before.  When  in  1270 
S.  Louis,  the  perfect  king  in  Christendom, 
went  to  his  eternal  reward,  the  climax  had 
been  reached :  more  man  could  not  achieve 
than  had  already  been  won.  But  even  then 
the  canker  had  shown  itself  at  the  heart  of 
the  white  flower.  Heresy  had  raised  its 
head  in  the  south  of  France  at  the  end  of  the 
twelfth  century,  but  Innocent  had  beaten  it 
down  for  the  time.  In  the  very  first  years 
of  the  fourteenth  century  the  French  crown 
had  seized  upon  the  Papacy,  establishing 
over  it  the  secular  control  Hildebrand  had 
died  in  destroying,  and  the  Exile  at  Avignon 
followed,  with  the  Great  Schism  in  its  trail, 
with  all  that  this  meant  of  loss  of  spiritual 
independence,  of  secular  dominion,  and  the 
paralysing  of  the  power  of  the  Church  in 
the  defence  of  faith  and  morals.  Aban- 
doned by  the  Papacy,  Italy  lapsed  into 
anarchy  and  even  barbarism;  in  Germany 
the  Empire  broke  down  and  a  vicious 
feudalism  took  its  place;  the  Hundred 
Years  War  desolated  France,  and  the  Black 

[21] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

Death  swept  over  Europe  like  a  pestilential 
flood.  Rebellion  broke  out  against  the 
governments  of  Europe;  Wy^liffe  and  Huss 
took  the  place  of  the  Saints  that  marked 
the  preceding  two  centuries;  and  once  more 
the  waves  of  invasion  threatened  the  fron- 
tiers of  Europe,  this  time  in  the  shape  of  the 
Turks  and  Tartars.  The  Latin,  or  Crusad- 
ing, Kingdom  of  Jerusalem  had  fallen  and 
the  same  fate  was  looming  over  the  remains 
of  the  Eastern  Empire,  but  in  Spain  the 
tide  had  turned  and  Ferdinand  III  was  fast 
crushing  back  the  Moslem  host  that  at  one 
time  had  threatened  all  Europe.  It  was 
a  time  of  critical  peril,  but  the  day  was  not 
lost,  as  yet:  heresy,  rebellion  and  anarchy 
were  menacing  Christian  civilization,  but 
so  they  had  done  before;  a  Philip  Augustus 
and  an  Otto  III,  an  Anselm  and  a  Thomas 
Becket,  a  Leo  IX,  and  a  Hildebrand  might 
have  met  the  peril  and  saved  civilization. 
Italy  alone  had  definitely  apostatized  from 
its  mediaeval  ideals;  Germany  and  France 
were  but  in  the  first  stages  of  infection; 
while  England  was  as  yet  wholly  exempt, 
and  Spain  was  vigorous  with  strong  new 
life.  A  firm  hand  in  the  Papacy,  right- 
eous kings  in  France  and  Germany,  a  new 

[22] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

Cluny  or  a  new  Citeaux  might  have  saved 
the  day,  but  none  of  these  things  occurred : 
instead,  a  Philip  the  Fair  comes  to  blight 
all  that  a  S.  Louis  had  brought  into  flovv^er; 
the  earlier  Hapsburgs  could  not  avert  the 
nemesis  of  Germanic  order  prepared  by  the 
last  Hohenstaufen;  for  a  hundred  years  the 
Papacy  was  but  the  tool  of  France;  while 
the  mendicant  orders,  in  spite  of  the  best 
intentions  in  the  world,  formed  but  dis- 
solving bulwarks  against  a  tide  that  had 
broken  helplessly  against  the  mighty  ram- 
parts of  Benedictinism  whatever  its  special 
form  or  name.  Inch  by  inch  the  virus 
engendered  in  Italy  during  the  time  of  its 
abandonment  by  the  Popes,  crept  through 
the  veins  of  Europe;  northward  it  advanced 
without  stay,  on  that  progress  that  was  not 
to  cease  until  at  last,  two  hundred  years 
later,  it  was  to  achieve  during  the  tyranny 
of  the  regents  of  Edward  VI,  final  su- 
premacy over  England,  the  last  stronghold 
of  Catholic  civilization. 

This  was  what  was  happening  darkly 
underneath;  on  the  surface  was  a  wonderful 
show  of  culture  and  refinement:  chivalry 
was  flaunting  its  splendid  pageantry  across 
Europe,  and  almost  every  year  was  born 

[23] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

some  child  who  later  was  to  be  the  voicing 
of  a  great  civilization  only  the  dregs  of 
which  remained  to  him.  Fra  Angelico  and 
Jan  Van  Eyck,  Filippo  Lippi,  Mantegna, 
Perugino,  Leonardo  da  Vinci,  Albert 
Diirer,  Botticelli,  the  Bellini,  Titian,  Gior- 
gione,  almost  all  the  great  painters  of 
Christendom  were  born  in  the  century 
that  intervened  between  the  beginning  of 
the  Great  Schism  and  the  election  of  Pope 
Alexander  VI.  With  them  came  into  the 
world  such  other  fruits  of  Catholic  civiliza- 
tion as  Joan  of  Arc,  Savonarola,  Erasmus, 
Sir  Thomas  More,  the  Chevalier  Bayard, 
S.  Ignatius  Loyola,  S.  Philip  Neri,  but 
simultaneously  those  whose  destiny  it  was 
to  bring  the  great  epoch  to  an  end  in 
ignorance,  anarchy  and  apostasy:  Luther, 
Macchiavelli,  Cranmer,  Cromwell,  Henry 
VIII,  and  the  spawn  of  the  house  of  Borgia. 
It  was  a  field  of  Armageddon,  prepared 
for  the  warfare  of  good  and  evil;  the  armies 
were  drawing  together,  all  the  hosts  of 
Heaven  waited  expectant,  and  in  the  year 
1453  the  great  battle  began.  Then  fell 
Constantinople  before  the  devouring  Turks, 
and  suddenly  over  Italy  poured  the  flood 
of  decadent  philosophy,   evil   morals  and 

[24] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

false  learning  that  had  festered  there  in  the 
last  years  of  Byzantine  corruption.  It  came 
in  specious  and  engaging  guise:  the  spirit 
of  the  Early  Renaissance,  which  was  really 
Christian  and  beneficent  in  so  many  ways, 
seized  upon  it  with  avidity,  wolfed  it  down, 
good  and  evil  alike,  and  changed  in  a  day 
almost,  becoming  now  heathen,  profligate, 
anarchical.  Nicholas  V  and  Pius  II  tried 
too  late  to  stem  the  tide  and  turn  it  into  the 
channel  of  compromise ;  they  were  followed 
by  an  Alexander  VI,  a  Julius  II  and  a 
Leo  X.  Savonarola,  fighting  single-handed 
against  the  hell-let-loose  in  Italy,  went  to 
his  martyrdom;  Cardinal  Cusa,  S.  John 
Capistran  and  Erasmus  were  swept  before 
the  torrent  unloosed  by  Luther  and  Zwingli ; 
Calvin,  Beza  and  the  Huguenots,  with 
Marie  de  Medici  and  a  Catholicism  al- 
ready debauched  by  Italy,  turned  France 
into  a  shambles,  and  though  a  temporal 
victory  remained  with  the  Catholics,  it  was 
empty  of  righteousness  and,  unchecked,  the 
Renaissance  went  on  its  course.  At  last  the 
cliffs  of  England  that  had  so  long  withstood 
the  crescent  tide  yielded  to  its  assaults,  and 
Henry,  Crttmwell  and  Cranmer  rose  to 
triumph  over  Sir  Thomas  More,  Cardinal 

[25] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

Fisher  and  the  martyrs  of  monasticism. 
The  exile  at  Avignon  had  borne  its  fruits 
and  Catholic  civilization  had  come  to  an 
end :  what  followed  was  new ;  whether  good 
or  ill  is  not  to  be  considered  here,  but  it 
was  at  all  events  in  no  sense  Catholic,  and 
whether  good  or  ill  the  epoch  of  the  Middle 
Ages  was  Catholic  first,  last  and  always. 

The  Great  Thousand  Years  was  at  an 
end:  it  began  with  a  monk  and  it  ended 
with  a  monk;  what  Benedict  had  begun 
when  he  promulgated  his  Rule  in  510, 
Richard  Whiting,  Benedictine  Abbot  of 
Glastonbury,  sealed  with  his  blood  in  1539. 
For  a  thousand  years  the  impulse  set  free 
at  Monte  Cassino  had  widened  in  its  circuit 
until  it  ringed  the  world  of  the  West.  Each 
succeeding  century  saw  a  new  manifesta- 
tion, but  whether  Cluniac  or  Cistercian, 
Augustinian  or  Norbertine,  Dominican  or 
Franciscan,  it  was  all  of  the  household  of 
the  law  giver  of  Monte  Cassino,  and  to  the 
monasticism  made  possible  by  S.  Benedict 
we  owe  the  saving  of  civilization,  its  re- 
generation and  its  Mediaeval  victory.  But 
even  S.  Benedict  could  not  have  worked  his 
thousand-year  miracle  had  he  been  dealing 
with  the  exhausted  stock  of  the  South  that 
[26] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

already  had  done  its  vast  work  in  Greece 
and  Rome  and  Byzantium;  new  blood  was 
necessary,  and  this  was  found  in  the  North, 
in  the  lands  washed  by  the  Baltic  Sea.  The 
record  of  the  narrow  lands  of  Hellas  is 
wonderful  enough,  but  that  of  those  we  now 
know  as  Norway,  Sweden,  Denmark  and 
Saxony  was  more  marvellous  still.  From 
the  middle  of  the  fifth  to  the  middle  of  the 
fifteenth  century  the  world  of  the  West  was 
theirs:  from  the  Lombards  in  Italy  to  the 
Normans  in  England,  civilization  was  of 
the  North,  northern:  Franks,  Burgundians, 
Saxons,  Lothringians,  all  boasted  the  same 
fierce  blood  of  the  North,  and  we  may  say 
that  the  Great  Thousand  Years,  as  we  know 
it  now  as  a  consistent  epoch,  was  the  off- 
spring of  the  marriage  between  Northern 
blood  and  monastic  religion. 

It  is  impossible  within  the  limits  of  a 
brief  essay  to  go  deeply  into  the  great  in- 
fluence that  conditioned  Mediaevalism  and 
made  it  what  it  was,  but  certain  essential 
features  may  be  noted.  Two  of  these  I 
have  already  named  as  primary.  Northern 
blood,  monastic  incentive.  Then  came  in 
some  order  we  cannot  now  determine,  a 
reforming  Papacy,  independent  of  secular 

[  27  ] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

control  and  arbiter  of  the  destinies  of 
peoples  and  princes;  a  single,  consistent  and 
united  religion,  free  of  heretical  or  schis- 
matic assaults;  and  a  powerful  sense  of 
nationality  growing  all  over  Europe  by 
leaps  and  bounds.  Ardent  and  efficient  as 
were  the  monks,  zealous  and  unflinching 
and  aggressive  as  were  the  occupants  of  the 
Chair  of  Peter,  their  efforts  would  have 
availed  nothing  had  they  not  behind  them 
a  Catholic  Faith  growing  richer  every  day 
by  that  progressive  revelation  of  new  as- 
pects of  truth  and  love  and  beauty  which  is 
the  inalienable  heritage  of  the  Catholic 
Church.  At  last  the  majestic  scheme  of 
sacramentalism  had  received  its  last  illu- 
mination and  stood  revealed  in  all  its 
penetrating  perfection,  while  through  the 
realization  of  the  due  honour  and  functions 
of  our  Lady  in  the  Catholic  system  religion 
had  acquired  a  poignancy,  a  personal  ap- 
peal, an  authority  over  the  souls  of  men  it 
hardly  had  exerted  before.  It  was  the  one 
important  fact  in  life  to  all  men :  everything 
else  was  contributory;  and  —  ineffectively 
at  times,  misguidedly  at  times,  but  always 
earnestly  —  men  were  striving  night  and 
day  to  conform  themselves  to  its  will  as 

[28] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

this  was  revealed  to  them  by  Pope  and 
bishop,  monk  and  priest,  even  as  they 
strove  to  express  this  in  visible  form  through 
poetry  and  music,  architecture,  sculpture 
and  painting.  Politically,  it  was  a  time  of 
increasing  liberty  for  the  subject,  of  in- 
creasing responsibility  for  the  sovereign: 
tyranny  and  absolute  monarchy  and  the 
vicious  dogma  '^  the  king  can  do  no  wrong" 
are  the  children  of  the  Renaissance;  in  the 
Middle  Ages  a  vicious  king  was  apt  to  get 
short  shrift  if  he  went  beyond  a  certain 
point,  and  he  generally  tried  to  avoid  this 
mark  with  some  scrupulousness;  the  barons 
and  the  Holy  See  were  always  on  the  watch 
and  their  jealousy  was  keen,  their  arms  long 
and  muscular.  Socially,  there  was  no  middle 
class,  whereby  conditions  were  somewhat 
happier  than  in  more  recent  times :  the  lines 
were  sharply  drawn  between  noble  and 
knight  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  churl  on 
the  other,  but  between  noble  and  king  the 
line  was  of  the  faintest,  and  while  the  case 
of  the  peasant  was  almost  as  deplorable  as 
that  of  the  whole  body  of  labourers  in  the 
first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  the 
workman  and  the  craftsman  were  infinitely 
better  off  in  every  way  than  they  are  to-day, 

[29] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

while  to  each  one  in  the  lower  strata  of 
society  there  were  two  great  institutions 
whereby,  if  he  could  prove  himself,  he 
might  rise  to  almost  any  level  —  monas- 
ticism  and  feudalism.  It  was  a  question  of 
merit  only:  men-at-arms  became  squires, 
knights,  barons,  if  they  had  it  in  them  and 
could  prove  their  worth,  whereas  now  social 
advancement  depends  on  the  price  one  is 
able  to  pay;  the  son  of  a  shepherd,  a  churl 
from  the  fields,  a  scullion,  a  beggar  even, 
might  through  the  gate  of  the  cloister 
become  monk,  abbot,  bishop  —  and  still 
may,  thank  God,  where  religion  has  not 
become  either  a  dying  superstition  or  a 
social  amenity.  It  was  all  a  question  of 
ability,  of  capacity,  and,  whatever  their 
faults,  monasticism  and  feudalism  were  the 
great  agencies  for  enabling  any  man,  what- 
ever his  previous  status,  to  achieve  whatever 
position  in  life  his  abilities  warranted  him 
in  demanding.  There  was  nothing  of  in- 
dividualism as  we  know  it  now,  and  nothing 
of  socialism  as  it  has  come  to  be  at  the  hands 
of  professional  agitators,  yet  never  before 
or  since  was  personality  developed  so  com- 
pletely, nor  the  community  of  human 
interests  so  largely  realized.     All  through 

[30] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

the  Middle  Ages  names  scintillate  like  fire- 
works, character  flashes  and  corruscates, 
but  it  is  not  until  the  time  of  Wycliffe  that 
we  begin  to  get  the  note  of  egotism,  nor 
until  the  Renaissance  that  it  comes  full  tide. 
There  is  a  difference  between  the  individu- 
alism of  the  twelfth  and  early  thirteenth 
centuries  and  that  of  the  fifteenth  and  those 
that  have  followed,  that  is  hard  to  put  into 
words,  but  is  distinct  nevertheless  and  sig- 
nificant of  the  difference  that  lies  between 
Mediaevalism  and  modernism.  And  with 
this  brilliant  development  of  personality 
went  a  spirit  of  real  communism  quite 
different  to  the  bastard  thing  that  now  bears 
the  name.  Everywhere,  after  the  great 
cataclysm  of  the  Dark  Ages,  men  tended 
towards  each  other,  impelled  by  a  spirit  of 
solidarity;  knights  and  serfs  betook  them- 
selves to  the  somewhat  mitigated  protection 
of  the  barons;  these  coagulated  into  small 
nationalities  that  coalesced  and  formed 
kingdoms  that  grew  into  empires.  Cities 
gathered  themselves  together  and  won  their 
privileges  as  communes;  craftsmen,  artifi- 
cers and  workmen  banded  themselves  into 
guilds  and  fraternities,  merchants  into  great 
trading    corporations;    scholars    united    to 

[31] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

form  colleges  and  universities,  and  every- 
where through  the  length  and  breadth  of 
Europe,  setting  the  pace  and  leading  the 
wa.jj  men  and  women  crowded  into  old 
cloisters  until,  by  a  process  of  incessant 
fusion,  the  world  was  full  of  monasteries 
and  convents,  newly  founded  and  at  almost 
the  same  moment  becoming  the  generators 
of  still  newer  foundations. 

You  may  know  a  crescent  epoch  from  one 
that  is  decadent  by  this  test  at  least  —  if  its 
tendency  is  centripetal,  rather  than  centrif- 
ugal; if  scattered  units  are  being  gathered 
up  into  greater  wholes  instead  of  the  reverse 
process,  then  greater  fortune  lies  beyond 
and  the  coming  years  have  much  to  give. 
If,  on  the  other  hand,  things  once  united 
and  consistent  are  resolving  themselves  into 
their  component  parts;  if  a  Church  is  disin- 
tegrating into  sects,  a  philosophy  into  per- 
sonal followings,  society  into  classes  and 
sub-classes,  each  fashioning  for  itself  its 
own  aggressive  propaganda  and  its  scheme 
of  offence  and  defence;  if  literature  and 
the  arts  are  ceasing  to  be  a  great  popular 
voicing  and  are  becoming  the  personal 
idiosyncrasies  of  over-differentiated  egoists; 
and  if,  finally,  the  human  personality  itself 

[32] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

is  breaking  up  into  its  component  parts  so 
that  each  man  lives,  not  a  dual,  but  even  a 
multiple  life  (his  religion,  business,  philos- 
ophy, politics,  domestic  life  all  separated 
by  inviolable  frontiers)  then  you  may  know 
that  an  epoch  is  drawling  to  its  close,  and 
if  you  are  wise,  you  will  look  all  around 
for  signs  of  the  new  day,  the  grey  dawn  of 
which  must  be  visible  along  the  hills. 

The  Great  Thousand  Years  falls  in  the 
former  category,  our  own  period  in  the 
second,  and  yet  the  grey  of  the  coming 
dawn  is  easily  seen.  Everywhere  men  are 
looking  across  and  beyond  the  Renaissance 
field  of  vision  that  for  four  centuries  has 
held  all  eyes,  and  they  see  again,  after  a 
long  forgetfulness,  the  great  Christian  civi- 
lization of  the  Great  Thousand  Years. 
Leo  X  gives  place  to  Gregory  VII,  Mac- 
chiavelli  to  S.  Thomas  Aquinas,  Henry 
VIII  to  Louis  IX,  Boccaccio  to  Dante, 
Raphael  to  Giotto,  Palladio  to  the  cathedral 
builders.  The  Renaissance-reformation- 
revolution  engendered  materialism.  Prot- 
estantism and  individualism.  Great  in  the 
eyes  of  men  were  their  works,  and  the  as- 
tounding fabric  of  modernism  still  lacks  by 
some  courses  its  final  capstone.    The  end  is 

[33] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

not  yet,  nor  will  be  for  some  decades,  per- 
haps, though  already  we  are  approaching 
more  closely  the  definitive  year  than  almost 
any  of  the  other  epochs  that  have  preceded 
our  own.  If  there  is  to  be  no  violent  chang- 
ing of  historical  processes,  this  era  of  ours, 
however  swiftly  it  may  continue  to  mount 
on  its  ascending  course,  cannot  overpass  the 
end  of  the  century:  it  will  fall  as  fell 
Mediaevalism,  as  fell  the  vague  epoch  of 
reactionary  barbarism  we  call  the  Dark 
Ages,  as  fell  Rome,  and  Hellas,  and  all  the 
misty  empires  beyond  the  Christian  era. 
Another  great  change  is  at  hand,  as  always 
before  when  the  five-hundred-year  node 
has  been  reached,  and  for  man  to-day  the 
great  interest  lies  not  in  the  crowning  and 
creaming  of  the  breaking  wave,  but  in  the 
swell  that  slowly  rises  behind,  big  with 
prophecy  for  another  five  hundred  years. 

Is  monasticism  to  have  a  part  in  this? 
Are  S.  Benedict,  S.  Odo,  and  S.  Bernard, 
S.  Philip  Neri,  and  S.  Ignatius  Loyola  to 
join  with  their  number,  after  another  five- 
century  interval  that  separates  them,  yet 
another  great  Saint  who,  whatever  the 
manner  of  his  working,  is  yet  of  the  spiritual 
heritage  of  the  first  and  greatest  of  these? 

[34] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

There  are  signs  and  wonders  that  lead  us 
to  believe  that  this  is  to  be.  Beaten  down 
under  an  avalanche  of  persecution  and 
spoliation,  weakened  by  an  internal  anaemia, 
the  Orders  sunk  during  the  last  century  into 
comparative  desuetude,  but  there  they  have 
not  remained.  Everywhere  the  striving 
within  them  of  regeneration  and  bringing 
back  to  Ecclesia  Anglicana  of  the  religious 
life,  after  four  centuries  of  abeyance,  is  a 
thing  so  significant  that  it  can  be  despised 
only  by  the  hopelessly  superficial.  The 
manifold  evils  that  canker  the  civilization 
of  our  own  time  are  explicitly  those  that 
monasticism  is  best  fitted  to  cure,  and  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  has  cured  again  and  again 
in  the  past.  Within  this  era  are  no  powers 
of  regeneration:  atheism,  secularism,  ma- 
terialism, intellectual  pride  and  defiance  of 
law  are  ill  tools  for  building  anew  the  ram- 
parts of  the  City  of  God.  The  impulse  must 
come  from  without,  from  God,  not  from  the 
world;  even  as  it  came  in  such  varying 
degrees  and  different  ways  through  Bene- 
dictines, Cluniacs  and  Jesuits.  When  the 
abandoned  insolence  of  man,  mad  in  his 
pride  of  life,  has  dashed  itself  to  the  stars 
and,  falling  again,  crumbles  away  in  im- 

[35] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

potent  deliquescence,  then  perhaps  will 
come  the  new  prophet,  son  of  S.  Benedict 
(though  perhaps  in  a  new  habit  and  with 
an  amended  rule),  who  as  in  500  and  1000 
and  1500,  will  release  the  souls  of  men  from 
their  captivity,  and  strive  again  to  make 
all  things  new  in  Christ. 

We  cannot  read  the  mind  of  God,  and  in 
His  wisdom  it  may  be  ordered  otherwise; 
but  to  us,  seeing  as  in  a  glass,  darkly,  one 
thing  at  least  seems  clear,  and  that  is  that 
the  ills  of  which  our  world  is  dying,  but 
from  which  we  believe  it  may  be  saved  once 
the  end  of  the  century  is  passed,  are  pre- 
cisely those  that  are  the  antitheses  of  the 
Evangelical  Counsels,  in  deadly  rebellion 
against  them,  and  only  to  be  destroyed  by 
those  that  come  to  the  battle  in  the  bright 
armour  of  Poverty,  Chastity  and  Obedience. 


[36] 


TEN    YEARS   AFTER 


TEN  YEARS  AFTER 

THE  Great  Thousand  Years "  was 
written  in  the  winter  of  1907-8, 
and  in  December  1910  it  was  published  in 
"  Pax,"  the  magazine  of  the  Benedictine 
monks  of  Caldey  in  South  Wales.  In 
giving  it  now  for  printing  in  more  per- 
manent form,  I  am  impelled  to  provide  a 
commentary  drawn  up  in  the  light  of  war, 
and  to  call  it  "  Ten  Years  After." 

As  for  the  article  itself,  it  is  reprinted 
exactly  in  its  original  form,  with  only  a 
few  verbal  corrections.  When  it  appeared 
there  was,  in  the  circumstances  of  time,  no 
shadow  of  justification  either  for  its  as- 
sumptions or  the  deductions  that  followed 
therefrom,  a  fact  that  was  not  concealed 
from  the  author  by  numerous  and  plausible 
critics.  The  events  of  the  last  three-and- 
a-half  years  have  in  some  cases  revised, 
original  criticism,  but  thus  far  the  primary 
inference,  the  necessity  for  a  new  outpour- 
ing of  the  monastic  impulse  and  a  return  to 
Mediaeval  models  for  the  basis  of  a  new 
life,  is  still  rejected  with  general  unanimity. 

[39] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

When  "  The  Great  Thousand  Years " 
was  written,  neither  I  nor  anyone  else 
looked  forward  to  the  possibility  of  a 
world-war  as  a  possible  joint  crowning  and 
destruction  of  that  ''  modern  civilization  " 
in  which  we  had  no  confidence  and  for 
which  we  expressed  no  admiration.  Even 
Fr.  Figgis  in  his  "  Civilization  at  the  Cross 
Roads,"  and  Mr.  Chesterton  in  his  "What 's 
Wrong  with  the  World"  (both  published 
in  this  same  year  of  1910),  indicate  no 
vision  of  possible  war  as  the  last  act  of  the 
five-century  drama.  That  the  curtain  had 
risen  on  a  denouement  that  was  bound  to  be 
tragical  in  its  universal  destruction,  after 
the  fashion  both  of  Classical  and  Eliza- 
bethan drama,  was  clear,  but  the  motive 
and  the  progress  of  events  were  buried  in 
profound  mystery.  Four  years  later  we 
were  justified  in  our  anticipations,  even 
though  the  foreordained  event  was  of  a 
kind  that  never  had  suggested  itself  to  us. 

For  my  own  part,  the  forecast  of  world- 
downfall  was  based  partly  on  a  conviction 
/that   contemporary   civilization  was   of   a 
I   )  nature  that  made  it  intolerable  for  a  much 
'    I  longer  period  and  was  indeed  self-destruc- 
V^tive,    partly   on   what   appeared   to   be    a 

[40] 


TEN    YEARS   AFTER 

sufficient  demonstration  of  the  rhythmical 
or  vibratory  method  of  history,  and  on  the 
fixing  of  the  nodal  points  that  initiated 
and  determined  each  individual  and  self- 
contained  era  at  five  hundred  year  intervals, 
the  next  of  which  would  come  at  about  the 
end  of  the  century. 

Assuming  then  that  if  this  rhythm  con- 
tinued in  the  future  as  it  had  in  the  past, 
back  over  the  entire  recorded  space  of 
history,  it  became  a  natural  question  as  to 
just  where  we  stood  at  the  time  the  article 
was  written.  There  is  no  mechanical 
exactness  in  the  lines  that  are  followed: 
the  nodes  are  precise  and  each  terminates 
an  epoch  with  inexorable  fatalism,  but  the 
lines  of  curve  vary  to  any  extent.  From  the 
Christian  Era  we  have,  first,  the  swift  rise 
and  high,  jagged  table-land  of  Roman 
Imperialism,  falling  precipitately  with  the 
opening  of  the  fifth  century,  and  vanishing 
in  oblivion  by  the  year  500;  then  the  low 
and  ignominious  level  of  the  Dark  Ages, 
rising  in  the  unimpressive  hillock  of  Caro- 
lingian  recovery,  only  to  fall  at  once  to  the 
humiliation  of  the  ninth  and  tenth  cen- 
turies; then  the  dizzy  upward  leap  of 
Mediaevalism,  reaching  in  a  century  the 
[41] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

loftiest  levels  of  attainment,  continuing 
thereon  for  nearly  three  hundred  years, 
then  gently  declining  in  a  long  glissade  to 
the  year  1453,  with  the  rising  line  of  the 
new  era  crossing  it  in  its  pathetic  fall. 

And  what  of  this  line  that  swept  upward 
so  bravely  out  of  the  fifteenth  century? 
Had  it  already  reached  its  apogee,  and  if 
so  when;  or  was  the  cresting  still  beyond? 
In  the  case  of  the  antecedent  epochs,  time 
gave  us  perspective,  history  a  standard  of 
deduction,  and  we  could  with  confidence 
(if  also  with  presumption)  plot  our  ascend- 
ing and  descending  lines,  until  they  crossed 
with  curious  accuracy  at  our  pre-deter- 
mined  "  nodes  of  history."  With  the  last 
of  these  vast  vibrations  of  five  centuries' 
duration,  the  epoch  of  the  Renaissance  with 
its  sequent  phenomena  of  Reformation  and 
Revolution,  no  such  aid  was  offered.  Then 
it  seemed  safe  to  say  "  The  end  is  not  yet, 
nor  may  be  for  some  decades,  perhaps, 
though  already  we  are  approaching  more 
closely  the  definitive  year  than  almost  any 
of  the  epochs  that  have  preceded  our  own  " ; 
and  yet,  within  five  years,  without  warning 
and  without  preliminary  portents,  there 
burst  on  the  world  a  cataclysm  that  has 

[42] 


TEN    YEARS   AFTER 

answered  every  doubt,  making  clear  in  its 
own  red  flame  of  universal  devastation  the 
line    of    rise   of    the   ascending   wave,    its 
ominous  cresting,  its  inevitable  and  irrep-     / 
arable  fall. 

This  need  not  necessarily  have  been;  a 
war,  even  a  world-war,  does  not  imply,  of 
its  own  nature,  a  revolution  such  as  this. 
Wars  have  ended  eras  as  they  have  ushered 
them  in,  as  they  have  accompanied  each 
phase  of  their  development,  and  when  the 
first  Prussian  skirmish  line  passed  the 
frontiers  of  Belgium  there  was  nothing  in 
that  act  of  war,  nothing  in  the  possibilities 
it  laid  bare,  little  even  in  the  gross  and  re- 
pellant  fact  of  broken  oaths  that  alone 
made  it  possible,  that  gave  a  guaranty  of 
the  actual  sequence  of  events  which  proved 
even  exaggeratedly  dramatic  in  its  perfect 
exposition  of  the  qualities  that  marked  an 
epoch,  as  they  made  inevitable  its  unhon- 
oured  end. 

Dramatic  in  its  vivid  consistency,  almost 
miraculous  in  its  consummate  exposition  of 
things  both  hidden  and  denied,  the  war,  as 
it  has  been  waged  by  the  Teuton-Moslem 
allies,  is  the  great  revealer,  the  great  ex- 
positor of  "  modern  civilization."    Neither 

[43] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

Homer  nor  i^schylus,  Dante  nor  Shake- 
speare, could  have  devised  an  epic  or  con- 
trived a  drama  of  such  consistency  and 
power.  No  slip  in  character,  no  lapse  in 
consistency,  no  dramatic  opportunity  let 
pass,  the  mighty  creation  has  been  forged 
w^ith  consummate  efficiency,  and  from 
Liege  and  Kinsale  to  the  Isonzo  and  Brest- 
Litovsk,  there  is  no  weakening,  no  false  step, 
but  rather  a  coherent  and  masterly  building- 
up,  until  the  great  fabric  stands  perfected 
and  supreme,  —  stands  ready  for  its  fall. 

There  is  something  almost  Greek  in  this 
perfection  of  artistry:  one  thinks  instinc- 
tively of  CEdipus,  Antigone,  Hypolitus, 
the  note  of  fate,  of  implacable  destiny,  is 
so  clear,  its  workings  so  direct  and  cumula- 
tive. And  then  comes  the  shock  of  contrast 
between  the  terrible  morality  of  the  Hel- 
lenic masterpieces,  and  the  cold  profligacy 
of  their  contemporary  rival,  and  again  we 
are  conscious  of  the  irreparable  crevasse 
that  gapes  between  the  close  of  Attic  cul- 
ture, the  collapse  of  modern  civilization. 

Each  era  brings  some  new  things  to  birth, 
each  ends  after  its  own  fashion.  The  con- 
tributions of  the  last  five  centuries  are 
other  than  those  of  Greek  or  Roman  or 

[44] 


TEN    YEARS   AFTER 

Byzantine  or  Mediaeval  epochs,  and  the 
ending  of  their  day  is  just  as  strange  and 
new.  Five  years  ago  we  could  not  forecast 
the  nature  of  this  termination,  to-day  it  is 
clear  in  every  detail,  and  the  great  accom- 
plishment is  the  achievement  of  one  people : 
the  same  that,  five  centuries  ago,  took  over 
into  their  own  hands,  and  conditioned  for 
that  period,  the  new  forces  of  the  Renais- 
sance that  had  been  generated  on  the  shores 
of  the  Mediterranean,  and  by  another  race 
under  a  different  impulse,  making  them 
into  something  new  and  alien,  and  offering 
them  to  those  others  of  their  own  kin  along 
the  northern  and  western  seas,  to  be  their 
guide  and  inspiration  until  the  unescapable 
end. 

Our  own  era  of  five  centuries,  all,  that  is, 
that  has  followed  the  lamentable  ending  of 
Mediaevalism  with  the  fall  of  Constanti- 
nople in  1453,  is  the  child  of  the  Renais- 
sance, but  this  is  not  the  Renaissance  of 
Petrarch,  of  Pico  della  Mirandola,  of 
Leonardo  da  Vinci,  of  Pope  Pius  II;  it  is 
that  of  the  Medici,  the  Sforza,  the  Borgia; 
of  Valla  and  Macchiavelli;  as  this  was 
assimilated,  transformed,  made  palatable 
to  the  mind  of  the  North  by  Beza,  Zwingli, 

[45] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

Calvin,  Crumwell,  and  Luther  protagonist 
of  all.  Granting  to  him,  in  whom  our  era 
had  its  beginning,  full  credit  for  an  original 
moral  sense  that  revolted  from  the  spiritual 
and  physical  profligacy  of  the  unholy  union 
between  a  decadent  Mediaevalism  and  a 
rampant  neo-paganism,  it  still  is  true  that  in 
him  is  found  to  admiration  the  perfection 
of  the  three  things  that  have  made  the  last 
five  centuries  what  they  were,  and  backed  by 
a  dynamic  force  that  established  them  in  an 
almost  universal  dominion:  worship  of  in^ 
tellect,  worship  of  force,  worship  of  the  ego^ 

From  the  first  came  that  cold,  logical 
and  bloodless  mentality  that  made  all 
things  in  heaven  and  on  earth  amenable 
to  the  intellectual  process;  that  destroyed 
mystery,  denied  the  higher  assent  of  spirit- 
ual perception  and,  in  the  end,  abolished 
sacramentalism.  Catholic  philosophy,  au- 
thority, religion  itself,  and  made  possible, 
indeed  inevitable,  the  philosophy  of 
Haeckel,  Huxley  and  Nietsche,  the  "  re- 
ligion" of  Harnack,  Strauss  and  Renan,  and 
the  materialistic-empirical  system  that  dur- 
ing the  nineteenth  century  gained  complete 
control  of  politics,  education,  industry, 
economics  and  society. 

[46] 


TEN    YEARS   AFTER 

From  the  second  came  the  inevitable 
declension  towards,  and  finally  upon,  the 
recognition  of  absolute  force  as  the  ultima 
ratio  of  all  things;  the  decay  of  the  moral 
sense  in  personal,  corporate  and  public  rela- 
tions, the  abolition  of  conscience,  the  aban- 
donment of  the  ancient  instinct  towards 
honour  and  chivalry,  the  return,  in  the 
impulse  towards  this  last  war,  and  in  its 
conduct  (so  far  at  least  as  Germany  is  con- 
cerned), to  the  sheer  brutality  of  that  im- 
moral reliance  on  force  and  force  alone, 
regardless  of  the  laws  of  God  and  man,  so 
fully  set  forth  by  its  great  expositor,  von 
Bernhardi. 

From  the  third  came  the  final  destruction 
of  the  old  communal  sense  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  that  splendid  and  specifically  Chris- 
tian impulse  that  had  brought  into  being 
the  early  and  beneficent  feudalism,  monas- 
ticism,  the  first  Crusades,  the  universities, 
the  trade  and  craft  guilds,  the  city-states,  the 
English  parish,  chivalry,  parliaments,  the 
very  states  of  Europe.  The  crowning  glory 
of  Mediaevalism  —  individuality  through 
communal  unity  —  had,  by  the  lapsing  of 
the  original  incentive,  degenerated  into 
individualism  through  disintegration,  and, 

[47] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

with  physical  force  accepted  as  the  effec- 
tive argument,  and  a  plausible  and  mordant 
intellectualism  to  give  plenary  justification, 
become  the  universal  law. 

Last  phase  of  all  comes  the  great  syn- 
thesis; the  unity  of  religion  destroyed,  the 
unity  of  philosophy  destroyed,  the  unity  of 
society  destroyed,  the  disintegrating  forces 
—  relationalism,  materialism,  individual- 
ism —  conscious  that  disruption  can  no 
further  go  except  to  the  next  and  last  step 
into  annihilation,  unite  in  the  creation  of 
a  new  thing  that  shall  take  the  place  of  the 
abandoned  honour,  conscience  and  God, 
and,  if  it  may  be,  form  a  novel  and  potent 
force  towards  the  building  of  a  new  era 
greater  than  the  last,  or  than  any  that  had 
been  before.  So  came  the  idea  of  the  State  ;1 
that  mysterious  fiction,  that  energizing^ 
force,  that  efficient  and  mechanical  entity 
that  has  reached  its  apogee  in  Germany 
and,  as  I  write,  is  justifying  its  claim  to  be 
the  one  effective  power  in  the  world.        ^ 

It  is  not  the  corporate  entity  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  that  effective  fact  that 
was  the  result  of  the  working  union  of 
individuals,  it  is  beyond  and  above  the 
individual,  it  exists  only  by  his  utter  self- 

[48] 


TEN    YEARS   AFTER 

abnegation,  it  rises  on  the  ruins  of  his 
abandoned  personality,  and  he  dies  that  It 
may  live.  It  is  not  a  substitute  for  or  even 
a  development  of  the  old  and  commanding 
religious  motive,  it  is  its  antithesis,  and 
after  two  millenniums  the  words  of  the 
Bishop  of  Reims  to  King  Clovis  are  now 
reversed,  and  it  cries  relentlessly  to  the 
heritors  of  the  Middle  Ages  as  well  as  of 
the  Renaissance,  "  Destroy  what  thou  hast 
v/orshipped;  worship  what  thou  hast  de- 
stroyed." All  the  content  of  Mediaeval  ism 
goes;  its  faith  in  the  undemonstrable,  its 
devotion  to  a  definite  ethic  it  loved  yet 
failed  wholly  to  achieve,  its  passionate 
following  after  spiritual  ideals,  its  faithful- 
ness to  an  abstract  honour  it  could  not 
justify  by  scientific  or  logical  methods,  its 
upholding  of  the  pledged  word,  —  all  go 
into  the  pyre  of  great  burning,  and  in  their 
place  is  accepted  for  fanatical  following  a 
new  and  awful  thing.  Material  Advantage, 
won  by  unhampered  force  and  justified  by 
a  cynical  philosophy  that  bases  itself  on  a 
denial  of  all  spiritual  verities  and  estab- 
lishes its  infallibility  by  process  of  scientific 
deduction  and  mechanical  logic. 
And  the  thing  itself,  together  with  the 

^    [49] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

forces  that  establish  its  foundations,  and 
those  defined  principles  whereby  it  demon- 
strates its  own  justification,  take  on  the 
aspect  of  a  great  reform,  a  new  advance  in 
the  evolutionary  development  of  humanity. 
This  is  its  greatest  strength,  for  while  in 
itself  it  is  reactionary  beyond  the  wildest 
imaginings,  it  explicitly  rejects  all  reaction 
and  assembles  for  its  backing  every  element 
of  mental  activity  that  claims  to  be  progres- 
sive. It  is  nothing  if  not  scientific,  intel- 
lectual, humanitarian  and  efficient.  Ration- 
alism and  the  scientific  method,  victorious 
over  dogma,  superstition  and  authority, 
are  its  foundation  stones.  Social  service  is 
proclaimed  as  its  objective  and  also  as  its 
method.  Material  welfare,  as  the  only 
definite  good  that  has  survived  the  break- 
down of  the  old  regime  inherited  from 
Mediaevalism,  is  the  sole  certainty  in  life, 
and  force,  fortified  by  the  appalling 
achievements  of  scientific  thought  and 
industry  during  the  last  century,  the  one 
practical  mode  of  operation.  Socialism  is 
not  antagonized  but  purchased,  so  patheti- 
cally becoming  ^'  State-Socialism  "  and  ceas- 
ing to  exist  either  as  an  ethical  or  an 
economic  force;  education  becomes  practi- 

[50] 


TEN    YEARS   AFTER 

cal  not  cultural,  and  the  advanced  ideas  of 
the  new  school  of  professional  pedagogy  are 
made  completely  contributory  to  its  own 
ends :  liberal  theology,  the  ^'  higher  criti- 
cism," modernism  and  "  new  thought "  are 
all  harnessed  to  the  chariot  wheels  of  the 
new  Juggernaut,  while  "  scientific  effi- 
ciency," or  as  it  is  sometimes  called,  ^'  Kul- 
tur,"  becomes  the  great  and  perfectly  effec- 
tive energizing  power. 

It  was  an  idea  magnificent  in  its  concep- 
tion, magnificent  in  its  working-out;  the 
important  point,  however,  is  that  it  is  un- 
deniably the  awful  thing  predicted  from  of 
old,  and  that  is.  Antichrist. 

I  suppose  it  was  just  this  masterly  taking 
over  of  all  the  forms  and  symbols  and 
methods  of  the  most  reforming  and  efficient 
modernism,  that  blinded  all  our  eyes  to  the 
nature  of  the  cataclysm  that  was  upon  us. 
That  a  great  and  ruthless  change  was  at 
hand,  as  a  result  of  which  the  whole  era  of 
the  last  five  centuries  would  go  down  in 
irretrievable  ruin,  was  believed  by  many 
people  and  asserted  by  a  lesser  number, 
but  I  do  not  find  any  recorded  prophecy 
that  this  would  be  engineered  by  the  very 
perfect  fruition  of  modern  civilization  as 

[51] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

it  showed  itself  in  its  perfection  in  Prussia. 
To  most  of  us  the  threat  came  in  the  shape 
of  some  kind  of  a  revolt  against  the  very 
efficiency  of  this  triumphant  civilization, 
probably  economic;  and  to  some  form  of 
internecine  and  disintegrating  warfare  pre- 
cipitated by  Socialism  or  anarchism,  most 
of  us  looked  for  the  inevitable  catastrophe. 
Instead  we  can  see  now  that  the  revolt  of 
Socialism,*  like  all  the  other  conspicuous 
phenomena  of  reform,  was  simply  a  by- 
product of  civilization  itself,  identical  in  its 
nature  and  its  interests,  and  in  the  end  a 
powerful  agent  towards  that  final  perfec- 


*  This  does  not  refer  to  "The  International,"  that  radical 
and  anarchist  outgrowth  of  a  respectable  Socialism  that  has 
never  been  deceived  by  the  Bismarkian  craft  that  has  betrayed 
the  "conservative"  type  of  Socialism  into  accepting  and  en- 
dorsing the  programme  of  imperialistic  politico-financial  opera- 
tors, which  at  the  outbreak  of  the  war  was  leading  directly  to 
industrial  slavery  or  the  "Servile  State"  of  Mr.  Belloc.  "In- 
ternationalism" is  working  consistently  for  the  Social  Revolution 
which  is  to  destroy  and  reverse  the  great  system  built  up  during 
the  last  five  centuries.  It  has  apparently  established  itself  in 
Russia  and  is  moving  steadily  towards  accomplishing  its  pro- 
gramme of  property  confiscation  and  a  proletarian  governmental 
oligarchy.  It  is  working  hiddenly  in  Italy,  France,  England 
and  the  United  States,  under  one  name  or  another,  though  through 
varying  channels,  but  always  with  the  same  end  in  view.  The 
war  opens  unlimited  new  opportunities,  and  through  it,  or  after 
it,  Internationalism  will  for  a  time  prevail,  so  becoming  the 
final  episode  in  the  destruction  and  extinction  of  Modernism. 

[52] 


TEN    YEARS   AFTER 

tion  that,  achieved,  was  to  become  its  own 
executioner. 

For  the  truth  is  that  what  we  call  "  Mod- 
ern Civilization "  has  simply  collapsed 
through  its  own  impossible  unwieldiness; 
it  is  like  a  toy  balloon  that  explodes  when! 
the  air-pressure  has  become  too  great.; 
Unlike  the  balloon,  however,  the  catas-j' 
trophe  is  not  instantaneous  but  progressive} 
the  process  may  continue  for  many  years,; 
even  for  two  generations,  but  it  must  be! 
evident  now,  even  to  the  most  optimistic,! 
diat  the  process  has  begun.  World-war,  the^ 
Social  Revolution,  —  and  what  then?  Far 
vision  is  not  given  us,  we  only  are  assured 
that  whatever  the  method,  however  numer- 
ous and  varied  its  phases,  the  end  will  have 
been  reached  by  the  close  of  the  century. 
How  long  it  will  take  for  the  building  of 
the  new  era  depends,  as  does  the  nature  of 
the  era  itself,  on  what  we  learn  from  the 
war  and  how  well  we  learn  it.  If  that 
"  transvaluation  of  values  "  of  which  we 
hear  so  much,  is  effected;  if  out  of  the  war 
we  achieve  our  own  redemption,  as  we 
freely  may,  then  the  nature  of  the  next 
epoch  is  assured,  and  its  accomplishment 
is  dependent  on  the  rapidity  and  the  una- 

[53] 


// 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

nimity  with  which  we  establish  our  new 
ratio  of  comparative  values,  and  transform 
our  methods  and  our  machines  to  make 
their  realization  possible. 

There  is  of  course  the  alternative.  If  we 
have  a  German  victory  and  a  German 
peace,  or  a  peace  by  negotiation  and  an 
approximate  return  (on  the  principle  of 
"no  annexations  and  no  indemnities")  to 
the  status  quo,  which  means  the  same  thing, 
or  if  we  have  an  Allied  victory  with  a  con- 
clusive peace,  but  with  a  return  to  all  our 
old  standards,  then,  whatever  is  gained,  the 
war  has  been  lost,  and  all  will  remain  to  do 
over  again  after  the  Social  Revolution  has 
had  its  way.  From  the  first  invasion  of  Italy ' 
by  Alaric  and  his  Visigoths  A.D.  400,  to  the 
coming  of  Theodoric  and  the  Ostrogoths; 
A.D.  493,  is  practically  a  century,  and  it  took 
this  space  of  time  fully  to  break  down  im- 
perialism. Rome  learned  nothing  from  the 
Visigoth  calamity,  little  from  the  coming 
of  Atilla  and  the  Huns,  or  even  frorrt 
Odoacer  and  his  Teuton  horde.  Rome 
never  could  learn,  she  was  destroyed,  that/ 
is  all;  and  the  last  invader,  Theodoric,  be-| 
came  a  king  of  desolation  and  began  the 
process  of  rebuilding  on  universal  ruin. 

[54] 


TEN   YEARS   AFTER 

There  is  no  assurance  that  we  shall  learn 
where  Rome  refused,  and  it  may  be  that  for 
a  century  we  also  shall  deny  the  writing  on 
the  wall,  until  the  present  war  is  followed 
by  revolution,  and  that  by  yet  other  visita- 
tions the  nature  of  which  we  cannot  predict, 
until  our  own  sequence  of  Goths,  Huns, 
Teutons  and  Lombards  has  taught  the 
lesson,  through  terror  heaped  on  terror  even 
to  ruin  and  extinction,  that  at  the  first  warn- 
ing we  refused  to  accept. 

Whether  we  profit  or  not  by  first  ad- 
versity, we  shall  profit  in  the  end,  and  not 
far  from  the  year  2000,  at  the  latest,  the  new 
era  will  begin.  It  was  towards  this  that  I 
was  looking  when  "  The  Great  Thousand 
Years  "  was  written,  and  with  particular 
regard  to  the  creative  powers  of  the  monas- 
tic idea  and  the  monastic  institution.  At 
that  time,  except  for  the  few  who  were 
interested  in  the  history  of  monasticism, 
knew  its  relation  to  the  development  of 
human  society,  and  were  conscious  of  the 
new  life  stirring  through  the  old  and  mori- 
bund orders  and  showing  itself  with  power 
even  where  before  it  had  not  been  for  cen- 
turies, there  was  no  excuse  for  the  hope  or 
justification  for  the  publicity.    There  may 

[55] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

be  more  now  (I  do  not  know)  who,  after 
three  and  a  half  years  of  war  and  its  pro- 
gressive revelations,  may  be  induced  to  a 
more  tolerant  view.  At  all  events  these 
years  have  not  been  without  result,  and 
already  men  are  turning  instinctively  to- 
wards the  religious  life  in  such  numbers 
as  have  not  been  known  for  generations. 
Let  me  add  a  few  more  words  on  the  theory 
itself,  explaining  more  carefully,  but  briefly, 
just  why  it  is  reasonable  to  suppose  that  the 
monastic  movements  of  the  fifth,  the  tenth 
and  the  fifteenth  centuries  should  be  fol- 
lowed by  another  in  the  twentieth  century, 
for  the  same  purpose  and  with  the  same 
result. 

I  have  said  above  "  the  manifold  evils 
that  canker  the  civilization  of  our  own  time 
are  explicitly  those  that  monasticism  is  best 
fitted  to  cure,  and  as  a  matter  of  fact  has 
cured  again  and  again  in  the  past;  .  .  . 
the  ills  of  which  our  world  is  dying,  but 
from  which  we  believe  it  may  be  saved  once 
the  end  of  the  century  is  passed,  are  pre- 
cisely those  that  are  the  antithesis  of  the 
Evangelical  Councils,  in  deadly  rebellion 
against  them,  and  only  to  be  destroyed  by 
those  that  come  to  the  battle  in  the  bright 

[56] 


TEN   YEARS   AFTER 

armour  of  Poverty,  Chastity  and  Obedi- 
ence." Does  the  war  make  this  statement 
any  easier  to  believe? 

Poverty,  This  is  the  antithesis  of  wealth, 
the  dominant  and  controlling  power  in  the 
world  before  the  war.  It  was  the  prime 
object  of  human  endeavour,  the  end  and 
aim  of  industrial  civilization.  During  the 
first  decade  of  the  twentieth  century  it  had 
fully  established  its  standards  in  society, 
politics  and  industry:  it  had  obtained  defi- 
nite influence  in  religion,  education,  art  and 
philosophy.  The  position  of  wealth,  in 
theory  and  practice,  was  so  universally 
acknowledged  that  no  argument  is  needed 
to  establish  the  fact.  Imperial  finance  layi- 
at  the  root  of  the  greater  part  of  all  State 
action,  the  parliamentary  system  and^dg- 
mo(^cyJ)e]mg^  used^si^^ 
camgjuflage..  Both  directly  and  indirectly 
it  precipitated  the  war. 

Monasticism  proclaims  poverty  as  its 
first  necessity.  The  word  has  two  meanings. 
First,  that  poverty  which  detests  wealth  as 
such  and  as  an  end  in  itself,  recognizing  it 
as  the  "  Philosopher's  stone  "  (with  reverse 
action)  that  transmutes  the  fine  gold  of  true 
values  into  the  base  metal  of  false  and  evil 

[57] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

Standards.  Second,  that  poverty  which 
aims  to  destroy  covetousness  by  taking  from 
the  individual  all  possibility  of  private 
material  possession,  and  vesting  it  in  a 
group  or  community.  To  the  poisonous 
influence  of  concrete,  hoardable  wealth,  in 
itself,  the  world  had  added  the  gross  selfish- 
ness that  tends  to  grow  out  of  individual 
possession,  and  the  result  was  an  aggra- 
vated individualism  that  destroyed  the 
virtue  and  the  potency  of  wholesome  so- 
ciety, substituting  the  sinister  combinations 
of  predatory  interests  working  against  the 
individual  outside  the  ring,  and  sacrificing 
honour,  chivalry,  and  brotherhood,  which 
are  the  basis  of  the  social  organism.  To 
oppose  and  destroy  wealth,  so  estimated 
and  so  employed,  the  spirit  of  monasticism 
can  as  ever  render  service  not  predicable  of 
any  other  force. 

Chastity.  Here  also  we  have  two  mean- 
ings. First,  the  rejection  of  the  lusts  of  the 
flesh,  for  decencies'  sake.  Second,  voluntary 
renunciation  of  legitimate  joys  and  blessings 
for  the  sake  of  service.  In  the  first  case  the 
condition  of  the  world  was  probably  no 
worse  than  it  has  been  at  all  times  when 
wealth,  idleness,  fat  peace  and  religious  in- 

[58] 


TEN   YEARS   AFTER 

difference  have  marked  the  end  of  an  era. 
This  is  about  all  one  can  say,  for  it  certainly 
was  incomparably  lower  than,  for  example, 
in  the  early  Middle  Ages.  The  inherent 
possibilities  of  the  social  system  in  the  first 
decade  of  the  century  are  now  revealed,  and 
it  is  evident  that  unless  the  virtue  of  chastity 
is  preached  again  as  by  the  Benedictines, 
Cluniacs,  Cistercians  and  Franciscans  of 
the  past,  society  is  not  only  at  an  end,  but 
well  deserves  its  termination.  It  is  how- 
ever in  its  other  meaning  that  the  second 
great  monastic  principle  needs  emphasis  as 
never  before.  The  whole  scheme  of  conj 
temporary  life  rejects  and  denies  renuncia4 
tion  or  self-denial  in  any  form,  except  thai 
which  is  supposed  to  result  in  increased 
monetary  income  or  capital.  The  favourite 
philosophies  of  the  last  quarter-century  ex- 
tolled and  justified  what  was  called  "  self- 
realization,"  from  a  rancid  hedonism  to  the 
gross  selfishness  of  a  psychological  egoism 
that  honoured  the  man  or  the  woman  who 
wrecked  a  family  to  discover  a  "  soul  mate  " 
or  "  affinity."  Self-indulgence,  even  when 
the  moral  law  was  not  violated,  was  the 
guiding  force  in  life,  whether  it  resulted  in 
laziness  on  the  one  hand  or  feverish  "  effi- 

[59] 


THE    GREAT   THOUSAND    YEARS 

ciency "  on  the  other,  and  until  the  war 
came  to  rouse  the  sense  of  sacrifice  and 
renunciation  in  the  defence  of  righteous- 
ness and  justice  and  honour,  latent  in  every 
son  of  man,  this  holiest  motive  of  all  those 
operative  in  life  was  rejected,  despised  and 
forgotten.  The  war  will  do  much  towards 
restoring  it  to  honour,  but  when  the  fight- 
ing is  done,  the  spirit  of  monasticism  alone 
can  continue  to  uphold  the  high  valour  of 
renunciation. 

Obedience.  Here  again  we  find  two  in- 
terpretations. There  is,  first,  obedience  for 
its  disciplinary  value  to  the  individual, 
second,  as  a  means  for  the  accomplishing 
of  great  ends.  Industrialism  took  honour 
from  holy  poverty,  evolutionary  philosophy 
destroyed  chastity  in  the  sense  of  high  re- 
nunciation :  democracy  has  annihilated  the 
idea  of  obedience  in  any  sense.  The  break- 
down of  that  honourable  dependence  which 
always  existed  when  there  was  a  clear  and 
just  status  for  the  several  categories  of  life, 
was  disasterous,  for  status  was  correlative 
and  bred  sense  of  duty  on  both  sides.  It  bred 
obedience  also,  for  from  serf  or  peasant  up 
to  the  sovereign  there  was  an  ever-ascending 
scale  of  obedience  and  responsibility,  and 
[60] 


TEN    YEARS   AFTER 

during  the  Middle  Ages  at  least,  the  sover- 
eign, whether  king  or  emperor,  owed  obedi- 
ence to  the  contract  that  bound  him  to  his 
people.  Violated,  the  contract  became  void, 
and  the  king  himself  could  be  deposed,  and 
very  frequently  was.  Still  worse  than  the 
destruction  of  status  was  the  working  of  the 
democratic  method.  In  effect  it  has  meant 
contempt  for  law,  for  contracts  and  for 
honourable  obligations;  it  has  meant  the 
rejection  of  competent  leadership,  and  the 
insolent  claim,  so  easily  enforced,  of  equal- 
ity of  ability  where  was  only  gross  in- 
equality; it  has  meant  the  degeneration  of 
democratic  government  to  that  point  of 
incapacity  which  marked  the  "  free  "  com- 
munities, before  the  war,  just  as  industrial- 
ism, intellectualism,  and  the  full  applica- 
tion of  evolutionary  dogmas  meant  the 
exaltation  of  force  as  the  ultima  ratio 
amongst  the  communities  reputed  to  be 
"  un-f  ree." 

Obedience  is  quite  as  honourable  as  com- 
mand ;  without  it  liberty  is  not  a  benefit  but 
a  menace.  Unless  it  exists  as  a  recognized 
part  of  the  social  system,  as  a  thing  required 
of  all  men  under  varying  conditions  and 
towards  varying  authority,  no  corporate 
[6i] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

work  of  any  kind  can  be  accomplished  and 
society  will  merge  in  anarchy.  During  the 
last  generation  it  has  practically  disap- 
peared; from  individual  and  social  con- 
sciousness, from  the  family,  the  school,  the 
industrial  system,  the  social  organism.  The 
end  of  the  insane  progress  is  to  be  seen  in 
those  labour  groups  that  violate  their 
pledges  and  disregard  the  claims  of  honour 
and  patriotism,  even  in  the  midst  of  war,  for 
the  sake  of  pecuniary  gain,  or  to  enforce 
private  contentions  through  taking  a  base 
advantage  of  the  critical  necessities  of  the 
community.  It  is  also  seen  in  Russia,  where 
each  man  suddenly  became  a  law  unto  him- 
self, and  the  soldiers  entrenched  before  the 
enemy  debated  whether  to  carry  out  the 
commands  of  their  officers  to  attack,  or  to 
ignore  them  and  retreat  —  the  decision 
being  in  favour  of  the  latter  course  a  suffi- 
cient number  of  times  to  destroy  Russia,  to 
imperil  her  allies  and  even  the  cause  itself, 
and  to  make  very  real  the  possibility  of 
complete,  ultimate  disaster. 

Here  again  the  war  may  do  something 

towards  restoring  to  life  the  high  virtue  of 

obedience,  though  it  has  signally  failed  in 

Russia  and  gives  threat  of  failure  elsewhere. 

[62] 


TEN   YEARS   AFTER 

In  any  case  it  can  achieve  only  a  measure  of 
success,  and  it  is  to  the  monastic  ideal,  re- 
vived and  made  widely  operative,  that  we 
must  look  for  the  energy  that  will  restore 
the  lost  virtue  of  obedience  to  the  place  of 
honour  it  must  hold  in  each  individual,  and 
in  each  community  of  individuals,  whether 
this  is  secular  in  its  motive  and  its  aims,  or 
spiritual. 

Beyond  the  corrective  value  of  the  Evan- 
gelical Precepts,  there  is  yet  another  quality 
of  the  monastic  ideal  and  method,  which  is 
in  absolute  opposition  to  modernism  and 
may  perhaps  prove  the  solution  of  the  great 
problem  of  how  the  world  is  to  be  re-made, 
along  what  lines,  once  the  cataclysm  of 
destruction  is  accomplished.  It  is  based  on 
the  idea  of  communal  life  conceived  in  the 
human  scale.  For  five  hundred  years  there 
has  been  unbroken,  cumulative  progress 
towards  the  imperial  scale  in  all  things,  and 
the  perfection  of  this  system  was  achieved 
during  the  first  decade  of  the  twentieth 
century.  Imperial  States,  Imperial  Fi- 
nance, Imperial  Industry  rose  triumphant 
over  society,  and  the  greatest  of  these  was 
Imperial  Finance.  One  thing  only  re- 
mained to  be  achieved;  World-Imperial- 

[63] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

ism.  Germany,  in  the  last  days  of  July, 
1914,  launched  her  great  offensive  for  the 
achieving  of  this  Apotheosis  of  Imperial- 
ism, and  the  question  is  still  in  debate  as 
to  whether  she  will  succeed. 

Imperialism  in  government,  in  industry 
and  in  finance  must  all  be  destroyed  before 
the  world  can  go  on  again,  and  the  alterna- 
tive  is  that  which  also  lay  at  the  root  of 
the  greatness  and  the  righteousness  of  the 
Middle  Ages  —  the  human  scale  in  human 
associations.  In  a  sane  and  wholesome 
society  the  unit  —  domestic,  industrial,  eco- 
nomic, educational,  religious,  political  — 
is  the  group  where  all  men  are  presumably 
known  to  each  other,  or  where  at  least  their 
interests  are  so  nearly  identical  that  unity  of 
impulse  and  of  action  are  not  only  possible 
but  inevitable.  The  bloated  empires  enclos- 
ing and  stifling  countless  nationalities;  the 
vast  financial  aggregates  reaching  out  into 
every  industrial  centre  and  money-capitol  of 
the  world ;  the  bloodless  and  inhuman  indus- 
trial and  commercial  trusts  and  combina- 
tions on  the  one  hand,  the  subterranean 
ramifications  of  a  sinister  "  International- 
ism "  in  unionized  labour  on  the  other, 
must  pass  into  dark  oblivion  with  the  era 

[64] 


TEN   YEARS  AFTER 

that  created  them,  and  in  some  way  return 
must  be  made  to  the  living  units  of  human 
scale  that  made  the  guilds  and  communes, 
the  parishes  and  city-states,  the  orders  of 
chivalry,  the  universities  and  the  monas- 
teries of  the  Middle  Ages,  living  signs  of 
the  nearest  approach  man  has  yet  made, 
through  his  many  inventions,  to  a  sound, 
wholesome  and  righteous  organization  of 
society. 

'^This  is  to  be  the  next  move  in  the  line  of 
social  regeneration,  and  the  perfect  model 
now,  as  in  the  past,  is  the  house  of  a  com- 
munity of  men  and  women  consecrated  to 
the  Religious  Life.  The  model,  note,  not 
the  mode.  Monasticism  is  a  non-natural 
estate,  accepted  by  a  few,  through  voluntary 
renunciation,  in  order  to  accomplish  certain 
work  that  must  be  done  and  can  be  done 
only  after  this  fashion.  For  the  vast  ma- 
jority of  men  and  women  life  "  in  the 
world  "  is  the  life  to  which  they  are  called. 
For  them  the  system  of  monasticism  be- 
comes an  example,  and  it  is  this  very  quality 
of  communal  life  conceived  in  human  scale 
which  is  most  susceptible  of  extension  from 
the  cloister  out  into  the  manifold  fields  of 
secular  activity.     It  is  to  the  monasteries, 

[65] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

Benedictine,  Cluniac,  Cistercian,  that  we 
owe  the  fine  organization  of  society  during 
the  Middle  Ages,  and  it  is  to  these  Orders, 
together  with  the  others  that  have  come  into 
being  during  the  last  five  hundred  years, 
that  we  shall  turn  again  to  find  how  once 
more  we  can  build  up  a  life  that  shall  be 
human  and  not  Imperial. 

And  now  I  must  speak  of  one  assertion  in 
the  original  article  which  may  seem  to  run 
counter  to  this  later  commentary.  I  mean 
the  statement  to  the  effect  that  in  every 
crescent  epoch  the  controlling  force  is  cen- 
tripetal, in  a  decadent  age  centrifugal. 
This  is  true  of  the  past,  and  it  may  be  true 
of  the  future  without  contradicting  what 
I  have  said  about  the  necessity  of  destroying 
Imperialism  and  the  substitution  of  many 
units  of  human  scale.  The  present  century 
is  a  time  of  decadence  and  dissolution, 
when  all  that  had  laboriously  gathered 
together  is  being  dissipated  along  with  the 
hoarded  wealth  of  generations.  In  the  end^" 
either  as  the  result  of  war  or  of  the  im- 
minent and  inevitable  Social  Revolution, 
Imperial  Modernism  will  break  up  into  its 
component  parts,  and  we  may  very  well  see 
again  a  chaos  such  as  that  which  followed 
[66] 


TEN   YEARS   AFTER 

the  ending  of  the  Roman  Empire.  Out  of 
this  will  come  in  time  the  instinctive  gather- 
ing together  of  men  into  small  units  for  de- 
fence and  for  communal  development,  and 
the  sign  of  the  beginning  of  the  new  era  will 
be  the  assimilating  of  these  into  a  larger 
unity  without  the  surrender  of  independence 
and  autonomy.  It  would  be  as  impossible 
for  these  manifold  communities  to  continue 
indefinitely  without  cohesion  in  some  form 
as  it  was  for  the  feudal  units  of  France  or 
the  petty  states  of  Germany  to  exist  in  mutu- 
ally inimical  isolation.  There  will  be,  and 
must  be,  an  ultimate  synthesis,  but  the 
essential  unit  must  first  be  determined  and 
its  personality  established ;  after  may  come 
the  progressive  unity  that  marks  in  all 
things  the  crescent  epoch. 

The  process  followed  during  the  latter 
Middle  Ages  was  natural  enough,  but  with 
the  Renaissance  it  began  to  accomplish  it- 
self at  the  expense  of  essential  liberty,  and 
during  the  nineteenth  century  it  became  an 
insanity  and  a  curse.  If,  in  a  wisdom  born 
of  the  drastic  purgation  of  war,  we  return 
to  the  model  established  during  the  Great 
Thousand  Years,  and  build  a  new  world  in 
accordance  with  that  model  on  the  desolate 

[67] 


THE   GREAT   THOUSAND   YEARS 

ruins  of  the  old,  it  is  for  us  to  see  that  the 
lesson  is  well  learned  from  failure,  and  that 
when  the  synthetic  process  begins  we  do  not 
sacrifice  the  new  liberty  we  have  won  for 
the  old  Imperialism  we  now  are  casting 
away. 

May  the  sons  of  St.  Benedict,  whatever 
their  name  and  Order,  aid  us  and  guide  us 
in  the  great  work  of  rebuilding  a  world,  as 
they  have  ever  done  from  the  day  when 
Benedict  of  Nursia  went  out  from  a  crum- 
bling Rome  to  the  hidden  cave  in  the  Sabine 
hills  to  receive  the  Divine  revelation  of  a 
new  life  for  a  world  sick  unto  death. 

And  may  St.  Benedict  and  St.  Odo,  St. 
Bernard  and  St.  Norbert,  St.  Bruno,  St. 
Francis  and  St.  Domenic,  St.  Ignatius 
Loyola  and  St.  Vincent  de  Paul,  pray  for  us 
and  for  those  that  come  after,  that  the  work 
may  be  well  done. 


Laus  Deo 


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